Month: May 2016

Three Belmont English faculty—Dr. Marcia McDonald, Dr. Jayme Yeo, and Dr. Joel Overall (pictured L to R, below)—have secured a $6,000 grant from the Folger Shakespeare Library and have helped usher Digital Humanities into the Belmont English department. The awarding grant program is a sub-grant of a larger National Endowment for the Humanities project that is sending copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio around to all fifty states. This circuit includes a Nashville arrival in November.

McDonald, Yeo, and Overall successfully proposed innovations in “Teaching Shakespeare to Undergraduates,” and their collective efforts will create a digital archive of local productions of Shakespeare, primarily by the Nashville Shakespeare Festival, as a way of enabling students to investigate local determinants of meaning within productions. McDonald’s and Yeo’s Shakespeare classes will conceptualize and gather the content, and Overall’s Digital Literacies class will be actively involved in digitizing the archive. Part of the grant will fund a regional conference next spring to celebrate the project’s launch.

Five students graduated with M.A. degrees in English and celebrated their achievements on May 6 at the Belmont Mansion, where they read portions of their theses in front of friends, family, and Belmont faculty members. Each student is listed below with the title of her respective work:

Kristi Moore Galligan – “That’s Just the Way it Was: Segregation in Wilson County”

Meredith Harrell – “‘Is She Not Then Beholden?’: Hospitality, Reciprocity, and Revenge in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus“

Julia Canada Wilburn – “It Blew Them Away: A Study of Trauma, Place, and Identity in One Town’s Collective Stories”

Allison Christian Rau – “Vie de Joie: how a Southern Girl Found Herself in Paris”

Three faculty in the English Department recently completed the St. Jude Rock ‘n’ Roll Half Marathon, held April 29 in Nashville. Dr. Robbie Pinter (pictured left), Dr. Charmion Gustke and Dr. Jason Lovvorn (pictured right) overcame rainy conditions and a delayed start to showcase their dogged athleticism. The race, which benefits St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, began and ended in downtown Nashville and wound through the Belmont neighborhood at its halfway point. Pinter (3:56:04) completed her ninth half-marathon, Gustke (2:05:53) ran her fifth such race, and Lovvorn (1:58:01) finished his first.